You are standing near the site of one of Boston’s oldest and most consequential trees. The Great Elm stood here for centuries, a witness to some of the darkest moments in the history of Indigenous people in New England. By the time it finally fell on February 16, 1876, it had outlasted King Philip’s War, the bloodiest conflict in colonial American history.

When that war ended in 1676, the English declared victory. Metacom, the Wampanoag leader the English called King Philip, whose refusal to surrender Native lands had united a coalition of tribes against colonial expansion, was dead. Just weeks after the war was declared over, a Nipmuc leader named Tantamous, also called Old Jethro, was brought to Boston in chains and hanged from this elm on September 26, 1676. He had been lured to a peace negotiation at Cocheco with a group of forty of his people. It was a trap. Some were executed. Others were sold into slavery. It is even possible that Tantamous’s own son, Peter Jethro, believing he was securing his father’s safety, unknowingly delivered him to his death.

The same year, the Massachusetts General Court passed the Indian Exclusion Act, banning Indigenous people from living within Boston’s city limits. It was not repealed until 2005. 

A Harvard Indian College student named Eleazar wrote these words around 1678, mourning the losses of his people:

“I will try to recount with sad grief… You live after death; you are happy after this fate… Your mind now returns to the sky; victory has been shared.”